blog :: en :: computers :: phones :: symbian-market
Steve Litchfield has an interesting article over at All About Symbian where he shows that, for most of the most successful commercial Android applications available in the Android market, there are equivalents available for Symbian.
However, I'd argue that the advantage of having a larger market should be least visible in the "top anything" apps, as these are most likely to be adapted for more than one operating system. If everybody wants a certain app, it seems reasonable to port it, if it's at all possible.
Applications with smaller target audiences and smaller developers are much more problematic, as there is much less incentive (or even ability) to port them, so they are much more likely to be missing from "fringe" operating systems. And even so, a developer might argue that, while Bada or Windows have much smaller market shares than Symbian, they might still expand in the future, while Symbian with its definite end of life is only going to lose market share. So porting new small apps to Symbian becomes even less likely.
Another problem is that Nokia's posturing does throw a certain doubt on Qt's future (see a recent discussion on Slashdot, for example), so small individual developers might well be very hesitant to invest the time to learn this framework right now, if they don't already know it. Again, this effect will only apply to apps in the "long tail", not to big titles developed by big developer houses that already have the knowhow for Qt.
However, a large part of the appeal of "apps" on a smartphone is not just downloading "top apps" to make your phone do what is expected from a modern smartphone, but for developers to be able to quickly create small apps that do exactly what is helpful in a certain situation, and for users to discover these and integrate them into their way of life.
So, all in all, I don't think having "top apps" available on Symbian is a sufficient "apology" for Symbian at all.
posted at: 11:35 | path: /en/computers/phones | permalink